Henry VII was a peace-loving man, although he won his crown in the battle at Bosworth Field in 1485. He managed to end the Wars of the Roses, the vicious dynastic squabbles that had bedevilled England for many years. But, two years later, his army had to win a hard-fought and very bloody battle to preserve his kingship. This battle is described in some detail in this book, partly because it is important to emphasise that countries like England and Scotland were not peaceful places before the Reformation.
Critics of the Reformation often insist that it led to pervasive strife and many wars. There is some truth in this – but, on the other hand, the condition of pre-Reformation Europe was hardly peaceful or stable. The worst disaster in Scottish history, the terrible military catastrophe of Flodden Field, took place in 1513, a few years before the first stirrings of religious reform were felt in Scotland. At Flodden, James IV, King of Scots, died. He was one of the most powerful and charismatic of Scotland’s kings, and latterly his kingly obsession had been his desire to persuade the pope to undertake a new crusade. Rather presumptuously, James wanted to lead the navy of Venice against the Turks. The popes themselves were monarchs of a kind, ruling a large swathe of central Italy. Some of them were also warriors, notably Pope Julius II, who was however wary of James IV’s grandiose plans for a new crusade.
This, then, was the late medieval world: kingship was everything. The eminent Tudor historian David Starkey has emphasised that this was indeed a king-centred world. These kings were ‘the be-all and end-all of imagination and fact’.
Our story is partly about the smashing of kingly authority. The great figures in it are not kings, or queens, but men of humble birth, most notably a German, a Frenchman and a Scot: Martin Luther, John Calvin and John Knox. They created a new order (or, in some respects, a disorder) in which kingly authority was to be seriously diminished.
Even the most accomplished and glittering monarch of the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth of England, found that she had to endure more and more truculent and offensive challenges from religiously motivated Puritans who did not respect her office. In Scotland, Knox harangued his monarch, Mary Queen of Scots, with insolent confidence. And Mary’s son James VI was lectured in a hectoring manner, and very firmly put in his place, by the first great Scots Presbyterian, Andrew Melville. The Scottish Reformation was largely driven by demotic notions. It was one of the later European reformations – after some false starts, it began properly only when John Knox returned to Scotland in 1559 – and it should be regarded as a political and social as well as a religious revolution.
The Scots reformers, led by Knox, had a visionary determination to place education at the very heart of their revolution. This education was to be democratic; the sons of the laird’s servants were to receive just as good and thorough schooling as the sons of the laird.
There were many European reformations, and the first and most crucial one was German. The catch-all singular word ‘Reformation’ is nevertheless valid. This overall Reformation was a movement which encompassed immense national and even regional differences, and covers a series of diverse and separate reformations.
The Reformation movement – which the likes of Henry VII of England and James IV of Scotland, strong traditional Christian monarchs of the early sixteenth century, could not have dreamed of, let alone begun to understand – was unleashed by a coarse and obscure German Augustinian monk called Martin Luther. Coarse he undoubtedly was, and remained. But the obscurity vanished almost overnight. Luther was one of the few surpassing geniuses of human history, and a writer of unparalleled power. The process which he started in 1517 gained momentum with terrifying speed. He could not control it.
A man of stupendous energy, Luther smashed his way on to the European stage and changed everything. His detractors might say he simply smashed everything to bits, though there was much that was positive and creative in his legacy. He was, however, a diligent destroyer. He shook up a continent on which the Church was the greatest landowner, where more than 10 per cent of the population were clerics, and where the pope had political as well as spiritual power and influence.
Religious life before Luther appealed to the senses rather than the mind; the people’s year was punctuated by saints’ days and religious holidays that brought pageantry, colour and fun into otherwise bleak and grim lives. The plague was never far away. There was much fear and much warfare; life was chancy and insecure. Amid life, death was ever-present. People spent much of their time praying for the dead.
A man who somehow combined authentic humility and explosive arrogance, Luther was never the friend of peace and quiet. For the briefest of moments, he might have been dismissed as just another medieval prophet making lonely if eloquent criticisms of the corruption of the Church. But it rapidly became clear that he was special – and, as a threat to the established order across Europe, toxic.
Luther must always be the first and greatest figure of the Reformation. His crucial notion was that every individual should have the right to read and interpret the Bible for him- or herself. This, like the parallel notion of the priesthood of all believers, was an incredible idea; taken to its logical conclusion, it would have destroyed the need for any kind of Church at all: it would have made all clergy superfluous.
Whatever his faults – and there were many, not least his detestation of Jews – Luther was the supreme exponent of reform. He was in many ways the perfect revolutionary. This is one of his manifold paradoxes – for, in persona and background, he was essentially a conservative peasant, if an exceptionally clever one. A deeply spiritual man, he always spent a lot of time praying. He was also a journalist, a propagandist, a preacher, a pamphleteer, a writer of tracts and hymns and polemics, and above all a brilliant translator of the Bible. Millions of words poured from his pen in a furious torrent. As a wordsmith, Luther was both crazed and sublime. He was one of the most prodigious communicators in human history. And of course he availed himself of the crucial new invention, the printing press.
This mysterious and heroic man is desperately difficult to assess and understand even today – but it is essential to try to understand him, for he is the key to our story.
Luther was a kind of divine disrupter. After him came John Calvin, a colder man, the supreme organiser, a lawyer and theologian possessed of a rigorous mind and a controlled, lucid prose style. Towards the end of his tumultuous life, Luther became somewhat self-indulgent; but Calvin maintained the discipline that was so dear to his bleak soul, and drove himself to superhuman limits to the very end. He gave Luther’s erratic and shapeless Reformation form and order. He took a great river in spate and directed it into a more orderly channel, narrower and deeper. He created in Geneva one of the most remarkable religious communities that has ever been known. And he in turn influenced the redoubtable Scottish reformer John Knox, who was to preside over what was probably the most complete European reformation, even though it accomplished nothing like what Knox himself hoped for.
Significantly, Luther, Calvin and Knox were all born in comparative obscurity. But they shook the established order to its foundations. They took on the great and the good of their day with a zest that was genuinely revolutionary. At the same time, their attitude to secular authority was often ambivalent.
Despite the influence and effect of these momentous reformers, kings and queens and princes and popes remained important throughout the sixteenth century. Henry VII’s son Henry VIII, a duplicitous and bloodthirsty tyrant who has legitimately been compared to Stalin, nonetheless personally ushered in the English Reformation – an extraordinary process that was born not out of religious conviction but rather out of tedious matrimonial difficulties. So, in the words of Professor Andrew McGowan, the English Reformation was from the top down. The Scottish Reformation, in contrast, was against the country’s monarchy, not through it. It was from the bottom up. Having said that, it is important to remember that Scotland’s Reformation was achieved with the indispensable help of a foreign queen, Elizabeth of England.
The English Reformation was unique. At first a legal and political rather than a religious settlement, it was the creation of a wife-slaying despot.